Hello again
Critical Pages is back. This website has been around for a number of years and had changed, vanished, reappeared, had bursts of growth, gone dormant, and at times has apparently joined the Choir Invisible. Fortunately, while Critical Pages was gone our writers kept busy, cutting fine quill pens, scraping velum, and getting familiar with the new technology.

Notice that our writers are not working on scrolls. They’re composing individual pages and when they have completed a work they sew the stack of pages together along the left-hand margin. The result is a codex (in Latin), or book, since we’re using English. The benefit of this revolutionary change is that a reader can go from one part of the text to another simply by turning over one or many pages, not having to unroll a length of scroll at one end and roll it up at the other end, and all this done on a table. Furthermore, you can write on both sides of a page in a continuous text, but you can’t do that on a scroll. That cuts the weight of the book to half the weight of a scroll with the same text. And the page will lie flat, whereas on a scroll the inked and painted surface is rolled and unrolled, causing the old dry ink and paint to flake and gradually drop off . And though a hand-written books was usually too large and heavy to hold in your hands, you could lay it on a rather small table, which was made just for that purpose and called a lectern.